Vanilla

A fast, elegant and unopinionated framework

Vanilla is a framework for building instant web applications. It's fast.

Features

• It is JIT-compiled, can run in browsers, Node, Deno, GraalVM and even Rhino.
• Hassle-free, no build tools required. No webpack or Parcel. Not even Rollup.
• Vanilla is so easy, it does not even require any specialized documentation.
• It has a larger community than any framework. In fact, more than any programming language.
• Does not attempt to create a whole new environment for developers. They just use it.
• Unlike mainstream frameworks/libraries, it does not attempt to support browsers and engines. Instead, browsers and engines strive to support it.
• Supports cross-framework components that are easy to debug.
• ES Modules is built-in and works great with HTTP 2.
• Tweakable routing with the History API.
• Powerful fetch API, so you don't need axios or other alternatives.
• Built-in CSS-in-JS support, although I advise against it. SSR support too.
• Built-in map, filter, reduce, forEach for FRP, so you won't need bloated RxJS observables and operations.
• Strong object APIs for creating, assigning, freezing, defining properties, and more.
• Runtime object reflection with the Reflect API.

History

Vanilla was actually built in 1995 and supports event-driven, functional, imperative and even object-oriented programming. That is why it is not opinionated.

Vanilla was so primitive in its early days, that jQuery was created. After some time, frameworks flooded userland.

Vanilla eventually became powerful and started shipping powerful features. No complex tooling. No countless hours of debugging. No loopholes for complex systems.

Framework Comparisons

React

React is bloated. A typical application ships megabytes of JavaScript to the browser. Asynchronous rendering via prioritization is still a pain (and hazardous).

React is pushing towards functional purity with minimal side effects, a goal they haven't realized till today.

React developers, meanwhile, are more interested in Algebraic Effects and making setInterval declarative.

Vue

Vue is a popular and overrated rip-off of React. Not much of a difference.

Angular

Angular?

Svelte

Rich said Svelte is a programming language. Did I mention we were making JavaScript framework comparisons?

If the future of bundlers is no bundlers, I'm sure we can agree that the future of frameworks is no frameworks.

Preact

Vanilla has what they call a zero-cost abstraction system. That means no runtime (0kb). In large applications, even those few extra bytes count. With slower network, it just gets worse.

Installation

This is the best part. You don't install it, you just start writing!

Contributing

You don't contribute. Vanilla is stable.

Credits

Brendan Eich (for designing the first draft).